I keep saying on this series that being an author is a lot of work. Quite a few people don’t understand that. The perception is, once a book is written, it gets published, and then people buy the book and the money rolls in. But that’s only the very basics of what happens. There’s a thousand other steps in becoming a published author. And one of those is managing your social media.

Most of us are very familiar with social media. We use it to connect with old school mates, co-workers, and family. But social media can connect you with even more people than just your close circle. It can connect you with people all over the world. Many of which could be potential readers. It is a tool that you can use to increase your readership, which is very important for any author.

But how do you manage it? Do you just blurt out your news every hour of the day? Do you set up some kind of schedule? Do you have to be online ALL DAY?

Well, it all depends on where you are at in your publishing schedule.

There are three main phases of social media management: before your story comes out, during release, and maintaining your presence after the release. While some of the steps overlap, there’s some definite differences in how you approach social media during those time.

Today we are going to discuss what to do before a release.

Getting Started

Before you have a release out, you need to make sure you have a social media presence in the first place. What this means is, you have accounts set up, you are actively using them, and you have followers. This can be a very difficult step for some authors but it helps tremendously when you are trying to promote your work.

First, if you do not have any social media presence at all (which I have encountered before), open up a free blog (if you don’t have a website already) and sign up for the most popular social media platforms. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are a few of the most popular for authors. Look up friends, family and some popular authors and friend/follow them. Join some groups. Interact with other people on the internet. This will gain you a presence in the platform you are using.

Next, if you haven’t already, create a professional page on Facebook. Lots of reasons to do this but some of the most important are:

Keeping your private and personal spaces separate

No limit on followers

The ability to promote your work without being slapped on the hand by Terms of Service issues.

Lastly, use them. Social media is useless as a tool if you are not posting and connecting with people. Post something on your blog once a week, even if it’s an update on writing progress or a photo you took with your phone. At least once a day post something on Facebook and Twitter, even it’s liking a few posts or retweeting.

Now that you have those setup let’s take a look at some of the things you need to do before a release.

Before

Every author should maintain a social media presence, even if it’s a minor one. This assists you in a variety of ways, but mostly it’s to attract attention to you. If you have no presence at all, you are fighting an uphill battle to get noticed by readers as well as publishers. And in this day and age agents and publishers look to see if you have a presence on social media channels.

So what do you do before your book comes out?

Simple. Interact with people. While you are writing the book, post about some of the pitfalls you’ve encountered. Join some groups that discuss promotion ideas. If you have other hobbies, join and interact with those as well. Go ahead and announce when you write “The End.” Grumble about edits and how you didn’t notice that HUGE plot hole the beta readers caught. Post photos of your pets or what you saw on your daily walk. Be a person, however you might define that.

When and if you get an acceptance, contract or representation OR decide to publish your work yourself, announce it (if you are allowed to, please read through your contract carefully!). And THANK the people who respond. Then you need to think about your game plan to help promote your book.

If you are self publishing your work, you, alone are responsible for promotion. If you have a publisher, they may or may not have a publicist to handle promotion. If by chance, your publisher has a publicist, talk with them to see what plans they have for your work and then …

Promote your work.

Do not depend on a publisher or publicist to promote you. They may put forth only a minimum effort. Sure, they might have connections that you don’t have and might get you spots for guest posts and interviews, but in the end, they are only going to do so much for so long. It’s up to you, to keep the ball rolling. And that means you need to have a game plan.

Your game plan for social media should consist of things like content, when to promote, how often and where.

Content

Content is the things that will attract people to your site. It can include things like updates, press releases, cover reveals and personal posts. But this doesn’t all have to come from YOU! You can gain some excellent content by appearing as a guest on someone else’s blog, appearing on a postcast or video and answering questions in an interview. By planning ahead and putting forth a little bit of effort, you can have some great content leading up to your book release. Contact book reviewers, friends, other authors and even family to see if they’d be willing to help out.

When to Promote

The next thing you need to do is decide how often to promote your work. If you are a few months out, you probably don’t want to post too often about your work but as release time gets closer, you will want to pick up the pace.

If your work is 2-3 months out, posting once or twice a week about it keeps things fresh in your reader’s minds. But don’t just post a “BUY ME NOW” plea. Mix it up with updates on revisions, publishing deadlines, and when you’ve seen the cover. Some important things you can post about include:

Receiving edits

Returning edits

First peek at the cover

Cover reveal

Announcing final publishing date

As your publication date nears, you’ll want to post more often, and include links especially if you have a pre-order going on. Hopefully once you reach the during phase, one to two weeks before release date, you’ll have content in the form of guest posts, interviews and spotlights lined up to attract even more interest.

How Often

If your social media feed is full of “BUY ME NOW” posts twenty-four hours a day, more likely you are doing things wrong. Depending on where you are in your promotion cycle, you will have crests and troughs in how often you promote your work, but it NEVER should fill up all of your feed. If you are a few months out, posting a few times a week is about all you need to do. That can be easily scheduled on your professional Facebook page or by using a social media manager.

As you move towards your release date, gradually increase your promotional posts. By two weeks out, you should be posting at least once a day about your upcoming release. But you still need to keep a balance of one promotional post to ever four regular posts. Do make sure you vary your message. Don’t annoy people by privately messaging them or tagging them in promotional posts unless they have something to do with the upcoming publication.

Where

In social media there’s lots of places to promote your work. Do a search on Facebook for promotion and you’ll come up with a huge list of groups. Go ahead and take a peek at them and join them if you think your work will fit with the genre or theme of the group. Do read the rules and descriptions as to when it’s okay to post promotions. Many will ban you if you do not heed them.

You can also make good use of hastags (#) in your posts. This will help your entries show up on searches in many social media streams. You’d be surprised at how useful hastags can be.

Be sure to utilize your Professional Pages. Try to post new content there first then use your personal page to boost the signal.

You can even create character accounts on social media platforms such as Twitter or professional pages on Facebook. It is more work, but it works really great for some authors especially if they have a long running series.

If this seems like a lot of work, it can be but it can help you gain readers. And that’s what what promotion does. By working ahead of a release date, you’ve given readers a head’s up about upcoming releases, hopefully attracted new readers, and increased potential sales.

We’ll be discussing what to do during your release and after in upcoming posts so stay tuned!

Ivan Ewert was born in Chicago, Illinois, and has never wandered far afield. He has deep roots in the American Midwest, finding a sense of both belonging and terror within the endless surburban labyrinths, deep north woods, tangled city streets and boundless prairie skies. The land and the cycles of the year both speak to him and inform his writing; which revolves around the strange, the beautiful, the delicious and the unseen.

How did it feel to finish up the series finally?To be honest, it was an unbelievable relief. Finishing every book gave me a little shot of joy, but the series as a whole was like removing a ton of bricks from my shoulders. As you mention below, some of the story elements weren’t very pleasant to dwell on – and I carried them around in my head for over ten years. My procrastination and masochism seemed to enjoy joining forces for this process.

Of course, relief’s not the only feeling, and the project was worth its weight to me. I was very proud of finishing three novels and several short stories. While there are more writers today than ever before in our history, many of whom are far more prolific than I, it still felt like a great accomplishment. My father had encouraged me to get something printed on the way to his deathbed, so there’s a great deal of emotion tied up with that as well.

The one thing I’ll certainly miss is an excuse to work directly with Apocalypse Ink Productions. Nothing I’ve done would have seen the light of day without their encouragement, professionalism, and understanding.

Where did Gordon and the Ghouls come from? (Inspiration)Gordon’s got a lot of me in him. Probably more than was wise, but I started this series when I was young and (more) foolish. I wanted my protagonist to suffer from self-doubt, especially after he unknowingly takes part in such a terrible act, rather than the kind of cocky swagger so many of my protagonists have manifested. Making him Catholic let me reflect that great snowballing guilt – from one sin to another, and with little means of confessing to anyone who would listen after all he has done.

The origin of the Ghouls themselves is in the little towns that dot the Illinois prairie. Towns like Mahomet, Lick Creek, Kinmundy... all these tiny places that seem wrapped up in something older and more terrible than a rail stop, a bar and a lone crossroads. I pass through them driving south to Georgia, or west to the Quad Cities, and I can’t help but cast them with terrible secrets.

On top of that, there’s my sense that America has been devouring itself for centuries. The constant, rapacious hunger of the American character turns itself inward and perverts its original drive. Making the Ghouls some of the first inhabitants let me play with that idea.

How did you choose your settings?Google Maps. I mean, I started in Madison, Wisconsin because I’m very familiar with it and its surroundings; but after than I had to locate places that were far enough off the grid that a group like the Ghouls could actually function without too many questions being asked by neighbors.

You would not believe the trouble I went to in The Commons to find Carol’s house. I’ve still got it pinned to my personal maps, with notes on where the cul-de-sacs end, which forests are where, the location of fast food establishments. It’s a really remarkable tool, though it’s no substitute for actually being there.

In terms of broad geographical settings, I only intended to tell the story of The Farm at first, in the region I’ve lived all my life, the one I know best. When I was asked to expand New England, the South and the West were the most obvious divisions across America, the different tribes at war. Moreso now than before, but regardless.

What's your writing process?It’s what you’d call scattershot. I don’t (yet) have a standard time of day to sit down to write or revise – so I write when I have some time to myself, and plenty of time in the day. Solitude is important, I’m not a coffeehouse writer, partly because I know too many people in town. Every time I’ve tried it, I run into a friend, and writing time turns into catching up. Which is lovely, in its way, but not conducive to finished product. By the same token, when my family’s in the house, I feel like I should be present for them rather than sequestering myself in a writing den. So it’s mostly early mornings or evenings after dinner when everyone has a movie to watch.

I typically turn on music and attack the next chapter in order of appearance. I can’t write jumping from chapter to chapter or scene to scene, things get too chaotic and the connecting scenes take much more work to re-write if I don’t get them down organically. Sometimes something in the future will come to me, and in that case I try to write it down and stick it in a different file, then paste it in for edits later. For the most part, though, it’s always 1-2-3-4-etc.

I’ve become a planner rather than a pantser. I want to know what needs to happen in every chapter before I sit down to write them, to construct at least a skeleton. In short fiction that’s less true – I’m happy to be surprised in those cases – but for long form novels I need to know.

How did you handle revisions?I print out the entire work and read it through, line by line, usually tracing it with a red pen. I’ll mark the document up that way, then fix the work in the computer. That’s mostly just for typos and minor edits.

After that I print up a second copy which I read, aloud, on my own. That lets me catch any awkward dialogue, runs of my beloved alliteration or too much poetry in the prose for this work’s taste. While I’m doing that I will mark up areas that need to be stronger, sharper, or entirely rewritten. Then it’s back to the computer to do that work.

After that it goes to beta readers. I immediately fix any additional typos or grammatical issues, and file away any comments on things they don’t understand or disagree with. Once everyone’s comments are in, I look for common threads and attack those first, then go through individual commentary to see if I understand or agree with their issues.

After all of that is set, it’s off to Apocalypse Ink’s editor for the final go-round. I’ve been fortunate in that most revisions at that stage have been relatively minor, and relatively agreeable to me.

You didn't flinch at some of the story elements, how did that make you feel?The technical term is “squicky.” The final scenes of the trilogy were very, very difficult to write and keep my head on straight – not to mention keeping my appetite. Gordon’s experience in the Pen, his solitary anguish in the north woods, the perimeter around Carol’s house, probably more. All of these were difficult to push through, and required me to recognize the darkness I carry around. I work hard to repress that darkness in my everyday life, so in some ways, fiction is a nice release valve. On the other hand, I’ve kept myself up nights after writing some scenes.

It’s a curious thing, writing horror, when you identify more with the innocent victims than the “interesting” killers. I’ve always felt more pity for those in trouble than excitement around their plight. I never had the fascination some do with serial killers or mass murder. I’ve never watched Dexter, Hannibal... I’ve never even watched Silence of the Lambs, which seems strange when I say it aloud, but it’s the truth. I’m not a fan of watching horror. I enjoy reading it, but seeing it visually creates more of an issue for me; and when I write I have to see the images in my mind. So it causes a certain amount of queasiness.

Do you think there are more Gordon stories out there?I know there’s at least one: The Chainfields lay in the Southeast, the final bastion of the Gentleman Ghouls.

However, I’ve grown a great deal since initially coming up with that concept and that name, and I’m now keenly aware that I am not the person to tell that story. Even if I were, it’s a story that hardly needs to be retold and recast, particularly at this stage of history.

While my wife and her family are from the region, I’ve got no ties to it aside from them. My family has always been north of the Mason-Dixon line, and as such we only have the ties to slavery that all Americans everywhere must carry. It’s not something I can expunge with a horror novel, and I’m not about to try anytime soon.

What's next?I’m working on a young adult urban fantasy which should be lighter in tone than Famished: The Gentleman Ghouls. One of the neighborhood kids has been asking why he can’t read my stuff, so I promised him something he’d be able to read. It would be nice to have something my wife and mother could read as well!

Aside from that, I’m also working on monologues to be delivered live. I’ve performed in a number of one-man shows and truly enjoyed them, and would really love to be able to present my own work onstage one day. So I’m studying people like Spaulding Grey and Mike Daisey, working to see how they transformed their own experiences into spoken word. Of course, they’ve had more interesting lives. No matter. Just means I have to work at spicing things up a bit.

Wendy Hammer lives in Indiana with her husband, a collection of books, and a stockpile of tea. Her fiction has appeared in Urban Fantasy Magazine, Evil Girlfriend Media Shorts, the Shapeshifter Chronicles, and elsewhere online. You can find her trying to keep it reasonably weird on twitter as @Wendyhammer13.

How does it feel to write "The End" on the series?Pretty awesome, actually. Though I loved writing the characters, I’m really pleased I got the chance to finish the main storyline and tie the three novellas together. The challenge of making each novella both a full story on its own and a part of a larger arc was one of the most interesting and daunting aspects of this project. I learned a lot from it and that feels good.

How did you develop your characters?I tend to develop characters by daydreaming. I walk or drive or sit around and think. Sometimes I chew on questions. Sometimes I look for images or music for inspiration. The Cross Cutting trilogy began by thinking about city-based magic. Who would wield it? What would happen if they didn’t have a territory they’d bonded to? I started to play with locations and an image of Trinidad took form. I first imagined her on the walking trail in Indianapolis with her knife in her pocket, ready to hunt down some monsters. After that, I needed to fill in her world. I looked for balances—complements and opposites.

Fireman Dan started from a memory from my college days. Iris was inspired by a picture I found during an image search for pink hair and tattoos. I liked the idea of Trinidad’s romantic interest being soft-spoken and sensitive despite looking fierce and formidable. I originally envisioned Ache with electric blue Liberty Spikes, but that didn’t last long. The daydreaming trial and error process is all part of the fun.

What was your initial inspiration?I’ve always had a soft spot for the “making camp” sections in quest stories or games, and one of my favorite parts of that is when magic users set wards, people stand guard, and all that. It’s a cool bit of magic and has the potential for both danger and juicy character interactions. So, I guess the interest in location magic has been roiling about in my story-brain for ages.

The inspiration moment happened while I was walking around downtown Indy around GenCon and I saw a group of crime scene vans parked along the path. I knew then I wanted to write a story featuring those vans and figured what better foe than a protagonist most comfortable with her feet on the ground?

Why choose Indianapolis/Lafayette as your setting?I picked Indianapolis for two reasons. First, the vans and the path I’d been walking felt like the best match for the story and I liked the immediacy of the experience. Second, I wanted to write an Urban Fantasy set outside of one of the genre’s mainstay locations.

I wanted to move the primary location to the Lafayette area in part because I live there and I know it better. But, really, I picked it because it has so many liminal spaces and contradictions. Lafayette/West Lafayette are joined but distinct. It’s urban and rural, industrial and agricultural, farm and factory. It’s also a college town. Purdue University is this delightful mix of scientists, engineers, and creators. It has a huge population of international students and they help transform the community in all sorts of exciting ways.

Lafayette felt like a solid choice for my found family of characters to live. And it’s my way of saying that even in one of those states many may only see in the red mass on a map, we’re here.

What happens when your editor says "Do more x" on revisions?Most of the time, I’m happy to get confirmation that something wasn’t quite right and I see what needs to be done right away. I can brainstorm, rework, push, and pare back because I have a better idea of where the story’s weakness is. When it isn’t quite as obvious I reread the whole story. I think about what I was trying to do and take a look at how the pieces fit together. I try to see how deep the problem goes. I plan as best as I can and then leap on in. Sometimes I nail it. Sometimes I need another pass or two.

What was the best part about writing The Cross Cutting Trilogy?It’s hard to choose, but I think it comes down to the satisfaction of getting the pieces to come together. The Cross Cutting title is partly a play on “cutting cross” or taking a short cut (appropriate for a Walker), a nod to the cut between worlds, and a reference to a filmmaking technique that interweaves separate scenes. Taking this journey with these characters, managing two points of view, and creating monsters and menaces that could work both independently and as part of a larger threat was wonderful.

What was the hardest?Aside from learning some hard lessons about managing deadlines with work and life stress—I’d say one of the most difficult was appropriately handling the voice of the characters. The trilogy is basically written in a fairly close third. It’s my sweet spot most of the time because you can have some distance but still weave in lots of flavor in the narrative language outside of dialogue. At the same time, what can make prose vibrant runs the risk of falling into overkill or just sounding off. Trinidad is Caribbean and Irish—she’s a fighter, a POC, and not an American. Ache is a man, a musician and a body builder. Trying to see the world through their eyes and find language that reflects it meant a lot of research, a lot of open tabs for specialized dictionaries and websites, and a lot of conversation. It didn’t always make for speedy writing, but it was certainly rewarding.

What's next?I’ve got a handful of short stories I’m working on, but my primary focus is a novel. It’s my first secondary world fantasy—with heists, magic, performing arts, rogue healers, and a whole lot of buried secrets threatening to rise up and turn everything upside down. I’m both terrified and exhilarated—which feels just about right.